Understanding Emotions, Moods, and Feelings: Psychological Insights

Posted on May 30, 2024 in Psychology and Sociology

Properties of Emotion:

  • Emotion: immediate, relatively brief, response to env or thoughts
  • Involves conscious feelings, physiological response, changes in behavior

VS Mood:

  • Slow, long lasting, general state
  • No identifiable triggering events

Feeling:

  • Subjective sense of an emotion
  • One part of an emotional response
Components:
  • Subjective feeling
  • Physiological reaction
  • Behavioral responses (cognitive process)

Common Sense:

  • Events cause fear
  • Fear → physiological response and changes in overt behavior
  • Subjective experience of fear causes physiological arousal and behavioral responses

James Lange:

  • Triggering event → physiological responses → feeling of emotion

Problems:

  • Nervous system too slow for bodily response to precede feeling of emotion
  • Bodily responses happen without creating feeling of emotion

Cannon Bard:

  • Triggering event → physiological responses and feeling of emotion

Two Factor:

  • Triggering event → physiological arousal → cognitive appraisal → subjective feeling

Circumplex Model:

  • Emotions vary along 2 primary dimensions called arousal and valence
  • Valence: emotion is +/-, arousal = degree of physiological activation

Social Groups:

  • Can include gender, race, ethnicity
  • Magnifies differences in people

Social Identity Theory:

  • Focus on positives of ingroup
  • Focus on negatives of outgroup
  • Ingroup favoritism
  • Outgroup homogeneity

Minimal Group Paradigm:

  • Arbitrarily assigned into different groups
  • Examine behavior toward ingroup and outgroup

Social Facilitation:

  • Improved performance in the presence of others

Group Polarization:

  • Strengthening of an original group attitude after discussion

Groupthink:

  • Modification of opinions of group members to align with group consensus
Social Loafing:
  • People exert less effort when working in groups

Conformity:

  • Asch experiments showed people change behaviors to conform with others

Compliance/Obedience:

  • Milgram experiment involved participants administering shocks to learners

Social Norms:

  • Hotel towel study

Bystander Apathy:

  • Less sense of responsibility to assist in an emergency with other bystanders present

Attitude:

  • Opinion about something
Cognitive Dissonance:
  • Uncomfortable contradiction between thoughts or behavior

Implicit Attitude:

  • Attitude that you have but may not be aware of

Attribution:

  • Internal judgment about causes of someone’s behavior

Stereotype:

  • Specific belief about individuals based solely on their membership in a group
Prejudice:
  • Attitude and feeling toward an individual based solely on group membership

Discrimination:

  • Action toward an individual based on group membership

Origin of Personality:

  • Half gene, half environment
  • Genes and environment affect personality

Infant Temperament:

  • Basic aspects of individuals assessed nonverbally
  • Longitudinal study needed to see how personality develops over time

Assessment Methods:

  • Questionnaires
  • Self-report
  • Informant report
  • Behavioral observation
Attribution:
  • Explanation of causes of behavior